Aligning Climate and Health Co-Benefits through Supply-Chain Energy Intensity Coordination in China

The co-mitigation of carbon emissions and air pollutants offers substantial benefits but is complicated by divergent sectoral emission profiles and spatial disparities. By integrating input-output analysis with health impact source attribution, we examine how interprovincial trade redistributes CO₂ emissions and PM2.5-related mortality across China's supply chains. We find that demand from economically advanced provinces induces two distinct burden-shifting patterns between carbon emissions and health burdens. Carbon emissions are outsourced to sparsely populated northwestern regions through power generation, while health burdens concentrate in the densely populated industrial manufacturing belt of central and northern China. Despite production-side divergences, we identify a notable alignment at the final production level, offering opportunities to narrow the energy intensity gap through supply chain coordination. We simulate three convergence scenarios in which upstream producers in the nonmetal, metal, and power sectors adopt energy intensities of their downstream partners. These include full convergence (100% adoption) and two partial convergence scenarios (75% and 50% adoption), with the latter constrained by national benchmark performance. Full convergence reduces trade-related CO₂ emissions by 17% (491 Mt) and averts 19% of associated mortality (3.8 × 10⁴ deaths). Partial convergence scenarios still deliver meaningful co-benefits. This demonstrates that supply chain coordination offers pathways to reconciling production-side disparities and more balanced climate-health co-benefits in China.